The Correspondence of Thomas Jefferson
By Subject
KNOWLEDGE / MEDICAL
I am sorry to hear of the situation of your family, and the more so
as that species of fever is dangerous in the hands of our medical
boys. I am not a physician and still less a quack but I may relate a
fact. While I was at Paris, both my daughters were taken with what we
formerly called a nervous fever, now a typhus, distinguished very
certainly by a thread-like pulse, low, quick and every now and then
fluttering. Doctor Gem, an English physician, old and of great
experience, and certainly the ablest I ever met with, attended them.
The one was about five or six weeks ill, the other, ten years old, was
eight or ten weeks. He never gave them a single dose of physic. He
told me it was a disease which tended with certainty to wear itself
off, but so slowly that the strength of patient might first fail if
not kept up. That this alone was the object to be attended to by
nourishment and stimulus. He forced them to eat a cup of rice, or
panada, or gruel, or of some of the farinaceous substances of easy
digestion every two hours and to drink a glass of Madeira. The
youngest took a pint of Madeira a day without feeling it, and that for
many weeks. For costiveness, injections were used; and he observed
that a single dose of medicine taken into the stomach and consuming
any of the strength of the patient was often fatal. He was attending a
grandson of Madame Helvetius, of ten years old, at the same time, and
under the same disease. The boy got so low that the old lady became
alarmed and wished to call in another physician for consultation. Gem
consented, that physician gave a gentle purgative, but it exhausted
what remained of strength, and the patient expired in a few hours.
I have had this fever in my family three or four times since I have
lived at home, and have carried between twenty and thirty patients
through it without losing a single one, by a rigorous observance of
Doctor Gem's plan and principle. Instead of Madeira I have used toddy
of French brandy about as strong as Madeira. Brown preferred this
stimulus to Madeira. I rarely had a case, if taken in hand early, to
last above one, two, or three weeks, except a single one of seven
weeks, in whom when I thought him near his last, I discovered a change
in his pulse to regularity, and in twelve hours he was out of danger.
I vouch for these facts only, not for their theory. You may on their
authority, think it expedient to try a single case before it has shewn
signs of danger.
P. S. I should have observed that the same typhus fever prevailed in
my neighborhood at the same time as in my family, and that it was very
fatal in the hands of our Philadelphia tyros.
to James Madison, 13 January 1821
|